1. Field of the Invention
The present invention provides a method of searching for locations (e.g., websites) on a computer network (e.g., the internet). However, rather than directly reporting the search results to the user as conventional search methodologies do, the invention reorganizes the search results into storylines.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the richness of content on the web grows, so does the social and economic significance of the web. Web searches are increasingly becoming the default starting point for consumer product purchases, term papers, vacation plans, curiosity-driven exploration of topics, etc. The role of the search engine as an entry point to the millions of interesting slices of the web is therefore more sharply accentuated. A question that naturally arises is how best to utilize a browser's screen in summarizing the thousands of web pages that mention the handful of terms a user types into a search engine.
The first generation of search engines, beginning with AltaVista up to the currently most popular Google, have taken the viewpoint of ranking the search results in a linear order, and presenting the top ten or so results on the first page, with pointers to the next ten, and so on. This straightforward approach has served us remarkably well, and it is a fair guess that are more than half of all user queries are adequately handled by the top page in the search results. There are two main reasons for this: first, a good search engine is often capable of promoting to the top spot the best page relevant to the query, and secondly, most queries tend to have many highly relevant pages on the web, so just about any of them would serve well as the top result.
An interesting phenomenon occurs when one studies the top 100 pages for a query. Search engines routinely optimize the result set primarily for the top 10 positions; the pages listed in positions 11-100 (for example) share many interesting characteristics. For example, these pages may be viewed as good reflections of the quality of the “web presence” of the topic, as discovered by a good but mechanical ranking algorithm. Secondly, these results are usually relevant to the query, often contain valuable pieces of information, but are not necessarily the best pages on the topic. Finally, the relative merits of these pages are not always obvious; for example, for the query “tree sap car” (to find out how to remove tree sap from automobiles), the invention find that the page ranked 11 isn't particularly superior to the one ranked 49. A possible reason for the latter two phenomena is that search engines like Google employ global ranking mechanisms (e.g., PageRank), and the top 100 results are just the most important places on the web where the query terms are mentioned.